~ This blog will be an attempt to explain the significance of various works of great writing, the authors that create them, and some effort to understand correlations between great writing and contemporary events.

I believe there is a quote that says, “A fool and his money are soon parted,” but that sumbitch never read Neil Gaiman.

I was annoyed and frustrated with myself a few weeks back because Neil Gaiman and David Sedaris were both giving public readings in Dallas this year, and by the time I discovered the where and when of the venue the performance halls were already sold out. This was painful because not only were two of my favorite authors coming close enough to me to actually hear them read and speak in public, but every person attending these events were going to receive a free signed copy of their most recent books with a purchase of a ticket. So probably not actually free, but it feels free. I have no one but myself to blame for this missed chance, and since I already suffer from undiagnosed depression and give myself a pretty hard time I needed something to lift my spirits.

To Amazon I went.

Now I was aware of the fact that Neil Gaiman had started a new book, and once some of the early advertisements started appearing I knew I had to read Norse Mythology. I was originally just going to pre-order it, but then life happened I forgot, but once I started working at the Tyler Public Library and saw that we had ordered a copy I placed the first hold. Ever since I’ve begun working at the library my compulsive book shopping has, no stopped exactly, but at least dwindled to manageable levels. Why purchase a book when I can simply check it out and know that it’s there just a ten minute drive away? The book came in and I just devoured it, but halfway through reading it I realized that I needed my own copy. And so one night while searching through amazon I spotted, not just a hardback first edition, but an autographed copy. I’m a poor man, but also a fool, and so I proved the philosopher correct and divorced myself from 60 of my hard earned dollars. I don’t regret a thing.

Norse Mythology as a book has been a revelation because, like many people who went through the educational system in the United States I assume, I never learned much, or anything really, about the Norse Gods. Going to the school I did I was steeped in the classical tradition. We read The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, The Aeneid, Medea, Julius Caesar, and in the seventh grade I was assigned Edith Hamilton’s standard Mythology. This book, which still sits in my shelf today, was a great resource and a wonderful opening to the complicated world of Greek Myth, but I noted at the time that there was a small portion in the back of the book that my teacher never got around to assigning to us. In the back of Hamilton’s book is 24 pages (I counted) dedicated to the Norse Gods and their mythos. I forgie Edith Hamilton for the sparseness of this section since hard written records of Norse myth aren’t as prevalent as Greek or Roman records, but something has always irked me about the way this section of myth feels simply tacked on, when an in-depth reading and study of these myths reveals a great bounty of lore and stories.

As soon as my copy of Norse Mythology came in I showed it to my friend TJ, the founder of the graphic novel book club I’m a part of, and we both briefly compared the book, and it’s ambition, to Edith Hamilton’s work speculating that there now exists the possibility that within a few years it could be assigned in schools for a similar purpose. I honestly believe this, and after completing the book my assessment remains. Neil Gaiman has achieved through his efforts a beautiful book which has made me slap my head repeatedly wondering why it took me so long to read, and enjoy, Norse Myths.

To begin with I have to briefly mention “Freya’s Unusual Wedding” which is the story of how the god Thor lost his now iconic hammer Mjolnir. Though Gaiman opens the book with individual descriptions of each god and their affinities and powers, each story on occasion provides some background material. The chapter that covers the “wedding” begins with such a description of Thor’s Hammer.

Thor’s hammer was called Mjollnir. It has been made by the dwarf’s Brokk and Eitri. It was one of the treasures of the gods. If Thor hit anything with it, that thing would be destroyed. If he threw the hammer at something, the hammer would never miss its target, and would always flay back through the air and return to his hand. He could shrink the hammer down and hide it inside his shirt, and he could make it grow again. It was a perfect hammer in all things except one: it was slightly too short in the handle, which meant that Thor had to swing it one handed.

The hammer kept the gods of Asgaurd safe from all the dangers that menaced them and the world. Frost giants and ogres, trolls and monsters of every kind, all were frightened of Thor’s hammer. (109-110).

As it turns out the giants stole Thor’s hammer one night while he was asleep, and Heimdall, the guardian of Asgaurd who sees all, comes up with a plan on how to infiltrate the giant’s keep and steal the hammer back. The gods are discussing how to retreave Mjollnir when the most hilarious passage in the book is related:

“Well?” said Loki. “What about you Heimdall? Doyou have any suggestions?”

“I do,” said Heimdall. “But you won’t like it.”

Thor banged his fist down upon the table. “It does not matter whether or not we like it,” he said. “We are gods! There is nothing that any of us gathered here would not do to get back Mjollnir, the hammer of the gods. Tell us your idea, and it is a good idea, we will like it.”

“You won’t like it,” said Heimdall.”

“We will like it!”

“Well,” said Heimdall, “I think we should dress Thor as a bride. Have him put on the necklace of Brisings. Have him wear a bridal crown. Stuff his dress so he looks like a woman. Veil his face. We’ll have him wears keys that jingle, as women do, drape him in jewels—”

“I don’t like it!” said Thor. “People will think…well, for a start they’ll think I dress up in women’s clothes.” (115-6).

I noted that this passage was one of the most hilarious passages, rightfully so I would argue, and that distinction is important for too often in myth there seems to be an absence of humor. Perhaps it’s just the education I received growing up, but myth seems to be steeped in relentless tragedy, violence, rape, depravity, or anguish. I cannot recall any real humor in the Greek Pantheon, and seeing as how that was the only real pantheon apart from the Egyptians I was exposed to, the fact that a moment of humor could exist in mythology was a breath of fresh air. Thor eventually gets his hammer back after a long series of jokes and gags that rely on the uber masculine worldview of the ancient Nords, and promptly slaughters the giants. Still no word though on whether the catering was good or not.

Gaimans Norse Mythology relates the world and the gods and creatures that inhabit the world of the Nordic mythos, however unlike Edith Hamilton, who seemed to retain a kind of academic distance from her topic, Neil Gaiman allows his retelling of myth to be imbued with a little more character. Gaiman has explored these characters before and so this gives him a great edge. Any and all readers who have ever taken the time to read his graphic novel The Sandman Season of Mist is sure to remember the blustering oaf that is Thor and the sly demonic figure of Loki who would aid the Dream King in a way that would not be made entirely clear until the later Sandman volumes. I’d relate more but I’m preparing myself mentally to review those books one by one by one so the reader will have to be patient.

Now I can hear the contester. By the sounds of it Gaiman is taking a self-indulgent exercise by simply retelling the stories of the Norse Myth, why should I bother with that? If I want the stories of the Norse gods I should just read the Poetic Edda or the Prose Edda if I hate myself and life in general?

I should first remind my contester that if you hate yourself, you should really be reading the collected works of James Patterson. There’s a great difference between crap and art, and then there is work which tries to be neither because it is really nothing at all.

But as to the real complaint Neil Gaiman himself provides some response in his introduction to the work as he notes the fate of the original written materials and oral tales:

We have lost so much. (14)

He goes on to say:

I’ve tried my best to retell these myths and stories as accurately as I can, and as interestingly as I can.

Sometimes details in the stories contradict each other. But I hope that they paint a picture of a world and a time. As I retold these myths, I tried to imagine myself a long time ago, in the lands where these stories were first told, during the long winter nights perhaps, under the glow of the northern lights, or sitting outside the small hours, awake in the unending lights, or sitting outside in the small hours, awake in the unending daylight or midsummer, with an audience of people who wanted to know what else Thor did, and what the rainbow was, and how to live their lives, and where bad poetry comes from. (14-15).

Gaiman’s book is not an academic reproduction of the Norse Myths, and if the reader is truly interested in such a work translations exist and are constantly being produced. Gaiman is honest in the fact that he just wants to retell these stories, and that’s all the creative justification he needs. Because he is working with myth, and not a more contemporary story, he can rewrite these stories and incorporate more personality and dialogue into them, and while some might argue that that is “corrupting” the original myths they fail to see that this is a fallacy. Myths by their very nature are fluid beings that have shifted and altered over time. They adapt and change depending on the teller, and while written documents are considered sacred, it’s important to remember that when readers encounter such written documents, particularly ancient ones, the conflict of authorial intent becomes tricky and messy. I’m trying to say, sloppily, is that because these are myths Gaiman doesn’t have to make these a new Prose Edda. Instead he can, like Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, simply tell the stories that have been told over and over again, but bring a new life or light to them that feels relevant to the age he’s writing in.

That’s what’s marvelous about myth is that it can change.

I was taught in school, briefly, that Norse Myths were dark, gloomy, depressing stories in which every god was ultimately doomed to die. This eventual end, referred often to as Ragnarock, is inevitable and Edith Hamilton briefly describes this reality in her Mythology:

The World of Norse mythology is a strange world. Asgard, the home of the gods, is unlike any other heaven men have dreamed of. No radiancy of joy is in it, no assurance of bliss. It is a gave and solemn place, over which hangs the threat of an inevitable doom. The gods know a day will come when they will be destroyed. (443)

She continues this gloomy description a few days later:

All the best Northern tales are tragic, about men and women wh go steadfastly forward to meet death, often deliberately choose it, even plan it long beforehand. The only light in the darkness is heroism. (446).

This being my only real exposure to these myths at first I honestly thought that Norse Mythology was going to be a dark read of nothing but hopelessness. Obviously, I forgot every Neil Gaiman story I had ever read. Gaiman’s retelling of the Norse Myths can be dark, but each story is told in such a way that the reader is able to see Gaiman’s passion and dedication to these stories and that energy translates into a beautiful story that, even at it’s most grotesque or horrifying, still manages to sound lovely.

But what’s important ultimately is the way in which Neil Gaiman completes his book. Rather than end on Ragnarok, and end with death and destruction, Gaiman demonstrates his lasting importance as a story teller for he leaves these characters not with death, but a circle.

After the final battle in which Odin, Thor, Loki, Heimdall, and all the gods of Asgard are destroyed there is left a small party including the gods Balder and Magni who are looking over the battlefield. Balder spots something:

They go down on their knees in the long grass, the gods like children.

Magni, Thor’s son, is the first to find one of the things in the long grassm and once he finds it, he knows what it is. It is a golden chess piece, the kind the gods played with when the gods still lived. It is a tiny golden caring of Odin, the all father, on his high thrones: the king.

They find more of them. Here is Thor, holding his hammer. There is Heimdall, his horn at his lips. Frigg, Odin’s wife, is the queen.

“It is me,” says Balder. “It is me long ago, before I died, when I was of the Aesir.”

They will find other pieces in the grass, some beautiful, some less so. Here. Half buried in the black soil, are Loki and the monstrous children. There is a frost giant. There is Sutr, his face all aflame.

Soon they will find they have all the pieces they could ever need to make a full chess set. They arrange the pieces into a chess game: on the tabletop chessboard the gods of Asgard face their eternal enemies. The new-minted sunlight glints from the golden chessmen on this perfect afternoon.

Balder will smile, like the sun coming out, and reach down, and he will move his first piece.

And the game begins anew. (280-283).

At the end of this review I think back to the conversation I had with my friend about the future readers who find Gaiman’s book. I was assigned Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, but I’ve never gotten rid of my copy of the book, because no matter how many times I’ve tried I’ve yet to find someone who made the Greek myths so accessible. Having a book like Mythology allowed me the chance to actually understand and process the myths that have inspired thousands of years of writers, poets, playwrights, and artists who have shaped our culture. The Norse Myths have often, it seems, fallen upon deaf ears, but in the last few decades I have observed new legions of people discover and invest themselves in the characters and stories of Thor, Loki, Balder, Freya, and the old clever Odin. Gaiman’s book then is a boon to a new generation, and humanity period because it, like Mythology, will expose a generation to these myths which have too often been ignored or written off as hopelessly bleak.

Yes the gods die, and yes their stories are filled with bloody mahem, but the final image reveals, to me at least, a far more final conclusion than the Greek pantheon. Rather than simply live on a mountain and occasionally step down to rape the local girls, the Norse gods are aware of their ultimate end, but as Gaiman reveals it there is no real end. The gods die but are then ultimately remade. Their stories end and then start anew meaning that there is no true end or true beginning.

The stories continue ever afterwards, and there is no better testament to the quality of myth.

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes taken from Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman were taken from the W.W. Norton & Company hardback first edition. All quotes from Mythology by Edith Wharton were taken from the Little, Brown & Company Paperback.

**Writer’s Note**

For the record Red of Overly Sarcastic Reviews still probably has the best rendition of Norse Mythology after Gaiman and most of what I knew before reading his book came from this video.

While looking up images to include in this article I stumbled upon, what appears to be a sexy pin-up calendar using the Norse Gods, all of them men. I couldn’t find a good place for them in the article, so I included them here. Enjoy…how could you not?

Batman has become an archetype, and because of this making additions or alterations to his character or universe is not only a daunting task, it’s damn near impossible. I remember a few months back the Graphic Novel Book Club that I’m a part of finally decided to read Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean. I’d been lobbying for the book because, apart from Fun Home, I had never read a graphic novel that was so dense with symbolism and meaning. I’d actually written an essay that a friend of mine published, presented a paper on it at a small academic conference, and even written two papers for school on it. As such, when the meeting came, I gave my rating (10 means you have a shrine for it, 1 is you burned it and cursed the ashes) and then shortened my multivolume lecture on the book to a 10 minute ass-kissing monologue explaining why I thought the graphic novel was brilliant.

The remainder of the group didn’t share my views and proceeded to thrash the book apart.

Contrary to some though I actually enjoy it when I receive criticism because it forces me to consider new angles and either drop my old perceptions or reconsider my position to strengthen it. After the meeting one of my friends approached me and apologized, “It’s just that Batman is an archetype you know? He has to fit a structure or he isn’t Batman.”

This idea intrigued me, but it also made me wary about writing about Batman books or movies lest I suffer the eternal and unforgiving wrath of the internet. Whoever has suggested that nerds are meek clearly had never met one for the last decade has demonstrated that nerds can be vicious and cruel when so inspired, and speaking as one I can attest to this fact. Still though it’s getting to a point when scholars are able to sneak in copies of The Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One to conferences and classrooms and the eyebrows of the academy are not so ruffled. Batman always was art, and now that people have the venue and gumption to argue it as such I want to contribute in any way I can.

One of my favorite Batman stories is The Court of Owls. Around five years ago I went through a Comics explosion after one of my colleagues in the SI Office dropped ten comic books on a table and went to work. The first book I picked up was Detective Comics #1 of something called The New 52. DC comics had just rereleased their entire publishing line starting over from number 1 and so comic fans everywhere were both ecstatic and cautiously optimistic, or, as so often happens, waiting for somebody to mess up. I read the books on the table and immediately acquired directions to Ground Zero Comics, and from there my life was changed. I didn’t just read comic books, I inhaled them. It was about eight months later when I picked up Scott Snyder’s Swamp Thing run (impressive in itself for being the first good thing to happen to that franchise since Alan Moore), and from there I went to Batman which had been following the Court of Owls storyline.

What’s impressive about the series is not just how beautiful the actual books are, it’s the level of detail packed into every frame, every dialogue, every character. The resulting strength of the two volume story line made it quickly surpass every book in terms of sales of The New 52, and it has effectively established Snyder as one of comics’ greatest contemporary writers of the medium.

What makes Court of Owls unique is not just reinventing Batman’s badass badassery, it’s something far more ambitious. The first page of the book creates it:

In this one page Snyder has introduced a newspaper and a civilian populace alongside the architectural structures that make up Gotham and in this effort there is an attempt to create a real landscape of Gotham city. My reader may immediately protest, Gotham always had a landscape. I would argue however that Gotham was more of an abstract plain. Reading books like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Hush, and even Batman Arkham Asylum there was a pronounced lack of physical space concerning Gotham and this first page is only one example of it. Snyder regularly begins each chapter at a landmark, a social group, a historical scene, etc. and each of these opening passages brings out Gotham city not only as an urban hub, but a city with a rich history and culture that often gets ignored because Green Lantern’s in Gotham and needs Batman’s help.

It’s fair to say the history of Gotham city has largely been ignored because of such distractions, and while they were fun and interesting, the effect was to turn Gotham into an arena in which the gods were often fighting and dueling. Snyder himself isn’t immune to this, for in the Endgame saga when Joker returns he plays on this very idea pitting Batman against Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman, and Superman employing references to opera in order to solidify the presentation. Before the reader gets the idea that I feel this is a cop-out it’s important to note that I actually don’t mind this. Superhero’s by nature have always been melodramatic and archetypal, and while realism is slowly infecting the genre (sometimes to its benefit but often to its misfortune), the figure of superheroes in the collective imagination remains god-like.

Still, The Court of Owls succeeds as a story because of it’s grounding of Batman as a man with faults, particularly as it presents him as a man who felt himself master of history. In the graphic novel’s second opening Bruce Wayne narrates the history behind Wayne Tower, one of the city’s cultural landmarks:

The original Wayne Tower.

If you came to Gotham city today, right now, and took a tour of the building, here are some things your guide would tell you:

The tower was constructed in 1888, under the watch of my great, great grandfather Alan Wayne. He built the tower to serve as a symbol of welcome to people coming to Gotham. And, as your tour guide will point out, from the ground up it’s designed to give visitors like you the feeling that they’re cared for and protected. For example, your guide will say, the building has twelve gargoyles or “guardians” as Alan insisted they be called—one to watch over each passageway into the city. The five guardians at the first tier were placed there to watch over the five original gateways to the city—the three bridges and two tunnels. Higher up the tower is a ring of seven guardians, one to protect each of the seven train lines that converge at union station, below Wayne Tower’s base. And at the top of the tower, is the observation deck in which Alan insisted remain free and open to the public every weekend, all year round.

This is a long passage, and remember that this is only one page with several shots of a tower silhouetted against a sunrise. The Court of Owls is rife with presentations of the urban landscape, and while part of that is to hint at the idea that someone is watching from afar, another rhetorical effect is to place the figures in question against the size of the city and legacy of Gotham. Bruce Wayne is Batman, but he is just a man, and as the end of this chapter demonstrates he’s plagued by hubris:

Whoever it was that just tried to kill me, he was good. But he made a mistake. He tried to use Gotham’s legends against me. But I’m the only legend this city needs. In many ways, it’s my oldest and truest friend. And it knows me better than anyone, just as I know it. Which is why I can say that there is no Court of Owls. Not in Gotham. Not in my city.

The words “my city” betray the man, not the god that’s often presented.

While I was originally going to simply review Court of Owls, as I wrote and researched images for this essay I began to observe more and more how much Snyder presents Bruce Wayne as a man who believes himself totally in control of his city and its history, and as this pride becomes more and more apparent there is constant references and attention paid to eyes. Because I’m that kind of writer, connections between works are always being made apparent. The combination of eyes, hubris, city, and owls all lead eventually to Oedipus the King, sometimes if inaccurately referred to as Oedipus Rex.

Oedipus the King is a play I had to read originally in High School, and I don’t mean the summarized portion of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Freshman year of high school was when we had to read the classics such as Medea, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Julius Caesar, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and watch the film O, Brother Where Are Thou? We also got to read Great Expectations and Faulkner’s short story A Rose For Emily, which in hindsight still doesn’t make much sense but at least both of those of those texts got me permanently hooked to Dickens and Faulkner. Oedipus the King was the first on the list, and It was all very Greek to me.

That’s a joke, and a reference to Shakespeare you see. See? I should never try to be funny.

Oedipus the King, just in case the reader was sleeping during class when they should have been paying attention, is a play written by Sophocles and the inspiration Freud’s famous Oedipus complex. He’s also the figure of a brief mention in Disney’s Hercules movie. Oedipus is considered a hero of Greek tragedy because the man’s downfall essentially defined tragedy in drama. King of the city of Thebes during a time of great plague, Oedipus calls out to the citizens of the city-state that he will discover the cause of the disease and punish those responsible. Consulting with the city’s oracle Tiresias he discovers that someone has violated the royalty of the city. It becomes clear to Oedipus, and his wife Jocasta the wife of the former ruler, that he has performed the atrocity. Clues and prophecies eventually lead the viewer, as well as Oedipus himself to recognize that he is the culprit of the offense until at last he recognizes that the plague has been caused because Oedipus has killed the former King of Thebes and taken his wife, who is also Oedipus’s mother, into his bed and sired two children from her. Jocasta hangs herself at the revealing of this fact, and Oedipus upon finding her puts out his eyes with the pins that holds up her garment. The play ends with Oedipus being sent out into exile from the city state with Creon assuming control of the city.

At this point the reader may wonder what significance or relevance Oedipus has to the Batman graphic novel currently under discussion. If my reader will be patient, I will demonstrate how the stories mirror one another.

Throughout the play Oedipus the King there are brief allusions to eyes, often used in both the figurative and symbolic sense. In one scene the blind oracle Tiresias is summoned to the palace and gives the following prophecy:

In name he is a stranger among citizens but soon he will be shown to be homegrown true native Theban, and he’ll have no joy of the discovery: blindness for sight and beggary for riches his exchange, […]. (93).

Oedipus himself makes numerous allusions to sight during his investigation, but the most damning is near the end when he describes the death of the man who would become his father:

O no, no, no—O holy majesty of god on high, may I not see that day! May I be gone out of men’s sight before I see the deadly taint of this disaster come upon me. (110).

Oedipus eventually makes his wretched discovery and a second messenger relays what occurs after he discovers his mother/wife has hung herself:

Second Messenger: He tore the brooches—the gold chased brooches fastening her robe—away from her and lifting them up high dashed them on his own eyeballs, […] he struck his eyes again and yet again with the brooches. And the bleeding eyeballs gushed and stained his cheeks—no sluggish oozing drops but a black rain and bloody hail poured down. (132).

Before I suffered my first dream about my teeth falling out, there was nothing that bothered me so much as damage, specifically damage by needles, to the eyes. Oedipus’s tragedy was ultimately his hubris because it “blinded” him to the reality of the fact that he believed himself a kind of god or blessing to the city of Thebes, and that blindness was due in part to the fact he was blind to the history of his lineage and city. Looking back to Court of Owls there’s a similar predicament as Batman discovers that not only does the Court of Owls, a secret society responsible for the covert assassination of respectable citizens over the entire history of Gotham, exist but that it has existed seemingly hidden from him despite multiple efforts during his life to find it. He’s also blind to the fact that a man by the name of Lincoln March is growing ever closer to him eventually appearing to say that he is Bruce’s brother.

Eyes hold a special significance to the human species and Ralph Waldo Emerson explored it in his essay Circles:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. (403).

Snyder uses technology to show Batman’s blindness, for at the start Bruce demonstrates a contact lens that acts as a kind of supercomputer. This is the stuff of Batman technology that, while a first outlandish, is actually based in real or upcoming technology not that far away. But more than the “super-computer contacts” is the constant closeness of Bruce’s enemy that, like the truth of Oedipus’s past, ultimately attempts to destroy him by revealing that he has been blind to the true nature of the city.

Gotham and Thebes are the plains from which these two characters emerge because in the classical drama the city, the polis, is everything. Human beings are social creatures by nature, and reading many ancient and pre-modern texts one often sees that the punishment of criminals is often not death, but banishment. Human beings establish their identity and comfort in relation to one another, therefore when the hero suffers exile he experiences the ultimate punishment because he is denied the chance to find comfort and happiness by interacting with his friends and fellow citizens.

A conflict emerges however. Oedipus is ultimately destroyed by his blindness by actually blinding himself and becoming exiled. Batman, being Batman, cannot be exiled from Gotham (unless they’re doing some kind of “event” storyline, but even that doesn’t really mean anything when there are around six to seven Batman books on the market), but by the end of the Court of Owls Bruce’s ego has been broken and then eventually restored. And it’s rather telling that the final panel in the graphic novel is Bruce’s eye containing Gotham.

By now it should hopefully be clear what my actual thesis is. Batman: The Court of Owls follows in the tradition that my friend Anthony spoke of earlier. Batman is an archetype in the vein of a classical hero, however rather than Oedipus who is destroyed by his tragedy, Batman satisfies the new paradigms concerning the hero. Batman is a superhero, a figure who overcomes his mistakes and survives through it and so what is happening here is a kind of alteration on the traditional narrative. The reader of Batman is different than the citizen of Greece who would have watched Oedipus and felt a kind of catharsis from the tragedy. Hero-worship and hero-fantasy have become the norms of contemporary narratives; people like to watch the hero win and overcome. Rather than mourn a man’s tragedy, the contemporary reader wants to see Batman overcome and conquer the enemy that seeks to destroy him.

What unites these two works however is the idea of the city as a place of power where men find their destiny and greatness. Snyder’s gift to the Batman universe is not just a great new villain for fans to enjoy, his gift is giving the city of Gotham new details and features from which new writers and story tellers will be able to draw inspiration from. While the character of Batman will remain the superhuman tactician with enough gadgets to give James Bond penis envy, The Court of Owls has brought new life, energy, and most importantly a new Gotham City for Batman to discover.

The hero’s ego has been damaged, but bats always return with a vengeance.

*Writer’s Note*

If the reader is interested in seeing Oedipus the King performed much the way it would during ancient times there’s a brilliant version from 1957 which involves elaborate costumes and masks. You can see it by following the link below:

All passages from Oedipus the King were taken from the David Grene translation published in the University of Chicago Press book Sophocles 1 edited by David Grene and Richard Lattimore. The passages from Circles was published in Emerson: Essays and Lecture The Library of America Edition.

***Writer’s Note***

I didn’t mention it in the essay, but in case anyone was interested the riddle of the sphinx is as follows:

“What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three in the evening?”

Answer:

“Man.” When he’s born he crawls on four legs, when he grows up he walks on two, and in the evening of his life he walks with a cane making three legs.